Conjunction of Jupiter and Mercury

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Jupiter and Mercury will share the same right ascension, with Jupiter passing 1°26' to the north of Mercury.

From Cambridge however, the pair will not be observable – they will reach their highest point in the sky during daytime and will be no higher than 0° above the horizon at dawn.

Jupiter will be at mag -2.0 in the constellation Pisces, and Mercury at mag -0.4 in the neighbouring constellation of Aquarius.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Jupiter and Mercury around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Jupiter 23h44m00s 2°51'S Pisces -2.0 32"5
Mercury 23h44m00s 4°17'S Aquarius -0.4 5"4

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 17° from the Sun, which is in Pisces at this time of year.

The sky on 2 Apr 2034

The sky on 2 April 2034
Sunrise
06:22
Sunset
19:10
Twilight ends
20:47
Twilight begins
04:45


Waxing Gibbous

99%

13 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:56 11:43 17:31
Venus 07:16 14:06 20:56
Moon 17:21 --:-- 05:46
Mars 08:11 15:31 22:51
Jupiter 05:51 11:44 17:36
Saturn 11:27 19:00 02:33
All times shown in EDT.

Warning

Never attempt to point a pair of binoculars or a telescope at an object close to the Sun. Doing so may result in immediate and permanent blindness.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

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Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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